Found This Set Up. Opinions Please.

I try to avoid stacking, unless necessary. Stacking is somewhat unpleasant, unless you have something like a Stackshot or other automated stacking setup.

Otherwise, with enlarger lenses or bellow lenses, you need to shift the camera position some number of microns between shots. I just move the rear stand of the bellows only, which is easier, since you can move it by 20 microns or more (with a micrometer). Unfortunately, this means the magnification changes between shots, and you can get trails of hot pixels, even though Zerene Stacker is supposed to handle magnification changes well.

I am impressed that you know this already! But don't think of the light as ambient/stray, as the light that gets let in is indeed useful to the image.

What happens when you open the aperture is the reflection you see of the light source becomes more out of focus, and thus appears to be bigger. The lens captures the out of focus reflection, so you need to move the source farther from the lens to avoid having the reflection shine directly into the lens (edit: shine directly into the lens from the slab surface). Smaller apertures make the source appear smaller and you can move the source closer to the lens. For this reason, it's better to use smaller apertures when trying to capture color on slabbed coins, as you can get a higher light angle (to better show the "deep" coloration tones) without reflections from the slab. Some folks use smaller apertures for slabbed coins than for raw because of this.




Yes, it is due to shallower DOF that you need to stack. If the DOF is less than the height of the relief of the coin, you can't get the whole relief in focus. Once you get the microscope objective and start taking detail shots that have shallow DOF then you'll need to stack. I'm not trying to discourage you to do this, and in fact since you seem to be making lightspeed progress it's maybe time to take the plunge.

edited to add: Hah, SuperDave beat me to it. Was writing after he already replied. I should always check just before I press send.

Question:
On imaging slab'd coins, would it help to "mask" the rest of the slab with something like tissue and just leave the coin itself exposed as to reduce the reflection off the rest of the slab?

Edit:
Also, I have already noticed that I cannot get in close enough to the coin as I would like. To expose details in error's/rpm's?
I will try removing the ring on the stand to get a little closer but, I don't think this is going to help very much with what I want to accomplish.

What do I have to do/get to achieve this? I DO have an AmScope stereo microscope but do not really like the images I get from it. If you look at my post's a lot of them are taken with this.

I started with a cheap 25 dollar usb microscope and worked into the stereo scope and love it for quickly scanning coins but as I stated, the images I get, even with a 10mp camera attached leave ALOT to be desired.

Oh, and don't even think about masking at the coin level to help reflections. You will create more problems than you solve. This is specifically what I made the Smile Directors for so I recommend shaping the source.

Well, that's it for me all. I'm off to Hong Kong to tour the camera stores (for me) and curio shops (for my wife) and then flying back home. Will check back in about 36 hours.

Leverage. Attach something to the knob to extend it greatly. making the arc swing far less at the end of the attachment.

O------------

Here's where Ray takes over; I've little experience with microscope objectives. For the record, what do you figure to shoot with this much magnification? I haven't found anything yet that drove me to learn mine....

Ray has, though, so the need must exist.

I used the M5 to take a sequence of 6 shots of a 1957-D Cent with a filled B in LIBERTY at different focus planes and stacked them using Helicon Focus. I'll post the 6 shots first, then the stacked composite, so you can see the DOF for each of the component images. You can also download a trial copy of Helicon Focus and use it to stack the 6 images yourself. The trial copy will watermark the output but otherwise the operation is the same as a licensed copy, which costs $55 per year. You could also go with Zerene (I think it's about the same price) or you could use CombineZP, which is free but more cumbersome to use and the output is a bit oversharpened (you can modify the script but never tried optimizing it myself). I believe Photoshop or its variants can also be used but have never tried it.

The magnification is approx 4.6:1. This is the minimum achievable with the cone adapter on Vivitar bellows with Canon camera. I used a Canon XS. I did not do any post-processing of any of the images. This objective can be pushed up to around 7:1 with good results, though it will require more images in the stack due to even shallower DOF at higher magnification. Note that I did the stack by manually adjusting the camera and lens mounts on the rail, so the step size between critical focus planes is not very uniform.

Here are the 6 component images:














And here is the composite, focus-stacked image:



For comparison, here is the same coin shot with a Tominon 35mm (T35) macro lens at approximately the same magnification, with similar (but not exactly the same) lighting. To get a reasonable DOF, I set the T35 to f8. This makes the effective aperture f45, which is deep into diffraction territory, but once the image is downsized for publishing the diffraction does not look too bad. I could probably even go to f11 and get a bit more DOF while still having the downsized image look OK.



You will mostly see the degradation due to diffraction when you look at the image at 100% pixel level. Here are 100% crops from the stacked composite and the T35 single image: